The Recording Stayed Up

It was a hard winter and the group did a decent thing. Half the regulars couldn't get out, so somebody set up a camera at the back and streamed the meeting, and it worked — twelve people who would have sat at home alone were in the room instead. Nobody thought about the archive, because nobody was thinking about September in February. In March a man shared for eleven minutes about his brother, who had died in November, and about what he had said to him the last time they spoke. He was facing the camera. He did not know he was. What he consented to was a room: those faces, that night. The archive handed his story to an audience he never agreed to and cannot call it back from — in September his brother's widow finds it, because his brother's name is in it and she was searching for it. Everything about that group's decision was kind. But who hears a member's story is the member's own decision, made fresh each time he tells it — and a recording goes on making it for him long after the winter ends.